Are Narcissists More Likely to Support Terrorism? Exploring the Relationships Between Claiming Fake Religious Knowledge and Support for Violence, Peace, and Apathy

Abstract

Religious overclaiming is a persons’ tendency to claim to be familiar with fake religious concepts. In both Christian and Muslim samples, previous research has found a relationship between religious overclaiming and communal narcissism, as well as a relationship between religious overclaiming and support for religious violence. The present research extends previous work by including several different measures of narcissism including grandiose (agentic), vulnerable, communal, and collective narcissism to predict religious overclaiming for the Bible and the Qur’an. Moreover, the present research investigates the relationship between support for violence, peace, and apathy using an Internet Commenter task. The results found that grandiose (agentic), collective, and communal narcissism were associated with religious overclaiming and poor religious accuracy. Moreover, though grandiose (agentic) narcissism did not extend to support for violence, communal and collective narcissism did. Collective narcissism had a direct association with support for violence. While the relationship between communal narcissism and support for violence was fully mediated by intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity. Finally, poor religious knowledge and, interestingly, overclaiming a religion that is not your own predicted support for violence. Additional findings and implications are discussed. Tangentially, the present research also discussed the appropriate use of Signal Detection Theory to measure religious overclaiming.

Subject Area

Religion|Psychology|Quantitative psychology

Recommended Citation

Neria, Adon Lee, "Are Narcissists More Likely to Support Terrorism? Exploring the Relationships Between Claiming Fake Religious Knowledge and Support for Violence, Peace, and Apathy" (2017). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI10283967.
https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI10283967